16 June 2008

I could rant about a "John Doe" life: over a year of not having a valid ID card, living an almost underground life, mostly normal but with only a few minor annoyances (like having the bank accounts blocked, being unable to travel outside of the country or, if that matters, being unable to vote - it doesn't matter, we can't escape the communist mafia).

I could write, for those who know me closely and may jump to some wrong conclusions, about my beard: even if it is not visible, I still have a beard inside, nothing changed, I am the same.

Instead my choice was to write about photo framing, this may be useful for a wider audience.

So I took the plunge, temporarily shaved my beard and renewed my ID card (it expired over one year ago and I have not cared enough to replace it). I used the opportunity of the local elections around here, when the people at the office in charge work overtime, so I had my card ready in two days, instead of the usual wait (at least a week, I believe).

The lady at the office, bored by the perspective of working overtime, took the following photo:

With the red arrows I emphasized the bad framing: 40% of the photo is occupied by my body, which is useless, nobody is interested in my shirt (or the hair on my chest for that matter). The purpose of such a photo is to show the face, so use zoom and crop (they had a 6 MP Olympus camera, a SP-500 UZ I believe, which should be perfectly apt for the task), here is (gimped) how such a photo should look:

2 comments:

That's a strange thing. In many countries you must provide a picture that shows quite exactly what your mockup's picture shows. Pictures like the one that is on your actual ID-card are not accepted. That's true for ID-cards, passports and visas. I know this fact to be true for Swiss ID-cards/passports and for the US-visa.